Search in:

Billboard lands retailer in hot water

Trouble is brewing for an American retailer after customers noted that one of its tea kettles bears a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler.

Bemused motorists took photographs of the huge JC Penney billboard advertising the kettle as they drove past it on the 405 Interstate highway near Culver City in California, one of America's busiest stretches of roads.

''That Hitler looks like a kettle,'' commented one user of Reddit, one of several websites where the image was posted. ''He even has his right arm extended,'' wrote another.

JC Penney has since pulled the advert from the billboard and pulled the kettle its website.

Advertisement

The curiously designed piece of kitchenware is selling on eBay, however.

The item, listed as the ‘‘JC Penny Michael Graves Hitler Tea Kettle’’ is fetching as much as $US199 ($207) on the retail auction site.

‘‘Sold out online and getting pulled from the shelves! Red hot!’’ the eBay listing reads.

‘‘This is the exact one all over the news and disappearing fast - down the memory hole?’’ the description asks.

‘‘Memory hole,’’ a reference taken from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, refers to any mechanism to suppress a word, idea, image, or this case, teapot, from public memory.